👙 Why Are Athletes Wearing $100,000 Sports Bras?

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In today’s newsletter:

🗞 The Big Story: How Gordon Hayward Discovered the Weirdest Basketball Ever Invented

📉 Biggest Loser: The Truth Behind the Baseball Stadium Turned Residential Neighborhood

🏆 Winner’s Circle: Why Are Athletes Wearing $100,000 Sports Bras?

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🗞 The Big Story

This is the most high-tech basketball in the world, but not in the way you might think.

Background: A few years ago, Gordon Hayward was scouring the internet during the offseason for something that would help him improve his hand placement on the ball while shooting.

That’s when he stumbled across the YouTube channel of a man named Charlie Wallace, who was promoting a product called Qube.

To this day, I’m not sure how Gordon found Charlie’s YouTube channel since it still only has one subscriber, and only one of his videos has more than 100 views. However, that didn’t stop Gordon from ordering a Qube, which naturally caught Charlie’s attention.

So, Charlie decided to reach out and ask Gordon if he wanted to invest in his company. Gordon initially declined, but after showing the product to his former teammate, turned business partner Emerson Kampen, the two decided to buy Charlie’s company instead.

Over the next few months, Gordon and Emerson showed the Qube to everyone they could think of, from Steve Kerr to Klay Thompson, and every time they got the same feedback:

Everyone loved it.

How It Works: The Qube is made from a durable, high-density foam covered in synthetic leather to mimic the feel of a real basketball.

The only difference is that it’s shaped like a cube, so as you shoot it, you get instant feedback based on how it’s spinning if any of your mechanics are off.

Gordon said his favorite use for it is just sitting on the couch and shooting it repeatedly to lock in his form, but he also realized that this was the perfect training aid for players of all ages and skill levels.

So, after rebranding from Qube to Form last year, Gordon and Emerson relaunched the product in October 2024.

Paul George and Lexie Hull are also ambassadors for the product, which currently sells for $69.99 online.

📉 Biggest Loser

This is the most viral stadium renovation you’ve never heard of, but there’s a good reason why.

Osaka Stadium: Built in 1950 in Osaka, Japan, Osaka Stadium was once home to the Nankai Hawks, a team in Japan’s professional baseball league.

The Hawks played in this stadium for 38 years and regularly hosted crowds of up to 32,000 people.

However, when the Hawks moved stadiums in 1988, Osaka Stadium sat empty, hosting the occasional high school baseball games until it was slated for demolition in 1991 as a part of a city-wide redevelopment project to build more housing.

But when demolition of the stadium was postponed until the late 1990s, a construction company leased it and came up with an interesting proposal:

What if they just built the neighborhood inside of the existing stadium?

Stadium Turned Neighborhood: Over the next year, they removed the original playing surface and replaced it with a mini residential neighborhood, complete with streets, lights, and cars.

Naturally, this drew the attention of many curious locals and tourists who took the pictures, which went viral 30 years later. There’s just one problem with this post:

It’s not technically accurate.

Ghost Town: Sure, it’s true that a neighborhood was built inside Osaka Stadium, but no one actually lived here. Instead, these were all model homes that were just staged to look like a real community.

The construction company that built it was trying to sell potential Japanese buyers on western-style housing; however, according to reports at the time, locals weren’t impressed with the quality of the construction.

Still, these model homes remained like this for 8 years before the stadium was eventually demolished in 2000 to make way for the now iconic Namba Parks, a 30-story office building and shopping mall with a roof-top garden.

🏆 Winner’s Circle

Why are all of these athletes suddenly wearing sports bras?

Well, it’s actually a $100,000 piece of technology that’s solving one of the most difficult problems in all of sports.

Background: Back in 1999, co-founders Shaun Holthouse and Igor van de Griendt partnered with the Australian Olympic Rowing Team to measure the efficiency of how their boats were moving.

To do this, they placed a cellphone-sized GPS device inside the boats to measure their rotation and movement. However, the two founders eventually realized that this same technology could also be used to measure the efficiency of how individual athletes were moving.

Behind the Tech: So in 2006, they shrunk the device and placed it inside a vest that allowed the tracker to sit on an athlete's upper back. This new device utilizes a 3D accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer to track a player's every movement.

The device collects data like:

• Gravitational load

• Distance traveled

• Acceleration

This data can then be downloaded within minutes after a practice or a game for coaches and trainers to analyze.

However, how teams use this data is probably the coolest part.

Optimizing Workload: In the NHL, over 80% of teams use this tech to track an athlete’s “workload” every week. This helps them gauge how hard to push players in practice and gives them a metric to help better guide players back from injury.

According to Forbes, Catapult charges teams an average of $100,000 per year for its product, which is part of what has allowed the company to reach $100M in revenue so quickly.

But if teams across the NFL, EPL, NBA, and MLB can keep their very expensive star players in the line-up more often because of it, then I’d say it’s well worth the price.

⏱️ In Other News

• The Tampa Bay Rays promoted a (checks notes)… Ponzi Scheme?

• The UFL is off to a rough start.

• If you’re a content creator, watch this.

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👋🏻 Happy Friday!

More context on the position I mentioned at the top of the newsletter:

• Paid

• 10-15 hours per week

• May-September

• Remote

• Here’s the client: https://www.instagram.com/americanassociation/

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